The Feast of the Goat
Llosa, Mario Vargas & Grossman, Edith & Bell-Villada, Gene H.
THIRTY-ONE YEARS OF SOLITUDE The Feast of the Coat Mario Vargas Llosa Translated by Edith Grossman Farrar Straus & Cirux $25, 409 pp. Cene H. Bcll-Vlllada______ The Goat" was one of...
...Also, the Spanish adjective genial is not our English "genial," but rather indicates a work or action that is "of genius...
...Cene H. Bcll-Vlllada______ The Goat" was one of the popular, clandestine nicknames of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, the grotesque generalissimo who skillfully combined humiliation and terror, bribery and blood in tyrannizing the Dominican Republic from 1930 until 1961, when he was finally assassinated by a cadre of young army officers (with some U.S...
...The book is nicely translated by Edith Grossman, although the dialogue portions could be more oral and colloquial, more "I've got" than "I have...
...Some of the palace intrigues depicted here are perfectly conceivable in our corporate or academic corridors...
...It has been twenty years since Vargas Llosa came up with a novel this vivid and thrilling...
...In these suspense-filled scenes we become acquainted with each of the dissidents, and learn of their personal histories and their bitterness at the Benefactor for his having thoroughly degraded their, and the citizenry's, lives...
...Trujillo and his loutish henchmen represent sadism elevated to ordinary social custom and system...
...Four stories interconnect, flashing back and forward, Faulkner-style...
...Commonweal 21 November 9,2001...
...Yet here too Trujillo's destructive whims had once intruded, and Urania's macabre reminiscences (which obviously one shouldn't divulge here) will build up to a chilling surprise, a flashback ending followed by a complex and equally surprising coda...
...Readers will learn truckloads about what Trujillo did to his own people, about the terrible traumas that didn't heal—and in the bargain they will be gripped by a superb page-turner...
...His sole diversion is sex—bedding down young virgins, cuckolding his close subordinates, and then boasting of the exploits in banquet speeches...
...In the end the regime doesn't die, it gets "civilized...
...Moreover, like many novels about tyranny, the insights gleaned from The Feast of the Goat apply to everyday "politics" in the widest sense...
...The novel re-imagines "The Goat" in his final two weeks of life...
...Plans for a postassassination coup go awry, precisely as a result of the knee-jerk loyalties and demonic efficiency of the dictatorial machine...
...Joaquin Balaguer, a creature so strange he could have been dreamt up by H Garda Marquez...
...Vargas Llosa, a master of counterpoint, weaves these diverse voices into a narrative fugue that moves full speed ahead through crescendo and climax...
...help...
...His attire is always impeccable (he's most bothered by Hitler's sartorial sloppiness...
...Gene H. Bell-Villada teaches Spanish at Williams College, and is the author of books on Borges and Garcia Mdrquez...
...The Goat is gunned down halfway through the book...
...With this grand canvas, however, he recaptures the early greatness of Conversation in the Cathedral (1969) and The War of the End of the World (1981...
...On a different note, the book miraculously restores Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa to literary-master status...
...Balaguer's florid pat phrases, smiling threats, and faux-pious grieving will ring familiar to anyone who has endured manipulative kin, colleague, or boss...
...At his desk by 6 a.m., he works twenty hours a day, seven days a week...
...An evil genius at manipulation, he smooth-talks his enemies into serving him "for the good of the country" even as he ridicules them in public...
...In real life, Balaguer would remain in power until the 1990s, completely blind yet as foxy as ever...
...His latest work of fiction is The Pianist Who Liked Ayn Rand: A Novella & 13 Stories (Amador...
...Now, in 1997, she returns for a visit to her relatives and her paralyzed, mute father, an erstwhile, earnest Trujillo ally and senator...
...At times her rendering of military dirtytalk misses the mark ("You have a lot of balls"—instead of simply "You've got balls...
...Over the last couple of decades Varga Llosa seemed in decline as he misdirected his talents toward an ill-fated campaign for the Peruvian presidency in 1990, and generally morphed into a cranky, libertarian publicist and right-wing scold...
...The Feast of the Goat will most surely become the book about the long Trujillo nightmare and the ongoing, sordid aftermath...
...what follows, however, is horrific beyond measure...
...It joins the ranks of other now-classic novels—such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch, or Tomas Eloy Martinez's diptych dealing with the Peron pair—that famously capture the oddities, myths, and ordinary horrors of life under a Latin military despot...
...Short, round-faced, H with tiny hands, he is the phrasemaker and flatterer extraordinaire, a master of protocol and composure...
...Asexual, indifferent to wealth, and lacking in any military experience whatsoever, this cunningly mellifluous courtier nonetheless takes control, outwitting his most brutish rivals via a mix of honeyed words and shrewd alliances...
...Readers should be warned of the wrenching, though never gratuitous, accounts of dehumanization and torture that take up some of these pages...
...Equally sinister are the rise and triumph of Trujillo's figurehead president, Dr...
...His fabled gaze can impale the proudest and most hardened of fighters...
...Meanwhile his novels lost their rigor and scope, and some, like Mayta (1984) and The Storyteller (1990), were downright sketchy...
...As befits a historical thriller, the book is replete with period information...
...These homey chapters provide the book's few glimpses of family warmth and humane feeling...
...Now, through Vargas Iiosa's pen, he becomes a memorable character in literature...
...An amoral gangster, he keeps thousands of thugs on the government payroll, patrolling the streets in black VW Beetles...
...Waiting for Trujillo one night by the capital city's sea wall are a handful of aggrieved army men who've plotted his death...
...Framing the entire novel is its only presumably fictive matter, the personal odyssey of Urania Cabral, an attractive, forty-nine-year-old Manhattan lawyer-spinster who, at Commonweal 20 November 9, 2001 age fourteen, was hastily sent off for study in the United States, far from the Goat's mad whims...
...He doesn't sweat, he hardly sleeps...
...Still, Grossman has done a remarkable job, and American readers have every reason to feel grateful for her monumental labors...
...Chief focus is on the seventy-year-old phenomenon Trujillo, his rituals, manias, and wiles...
...No review can do justice to the abundant details and intrigues, the relentless pace yet utter translucency of The Feast of the Goat, much of which is historically true...
Vol. 128 • November 2001 • No. 19
